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The HP Frenzy

Keep an eye on just how many reporters are getting bylines on stories about the HP corporate espionage debacle.It isn’t just one or two at each publication.An incomplete and cursory count reveals 16 different Wall Street Journal reporters with bylined stories.I don’t think they had that many when they unraveled the Enron fraud.

The press has “flooded the zone” which is really bad news for Mark Hurd as they seem to want blood.Is there an ending here where he keeps his job?He missed an opportunity Friday to raise himself above the fray. Reporters tend to write the news straight but these new-fangled blog things give you a better sense of what they are thinking and he blew the press conference (here and here). I don’t think Dunn’s scalp will be enough (David Kirkpatrick at Fortune has the most interesting insight into Dunn’s situation and motivations).

The other guy in the crosshairs is Silicon Valley uberlawyer Larry Sonsini, whose apparant oking of the HP spying comes on top of his firms’s relationship with almost half of the Silicon Valley companies implicated in options backdating.

It is tough to get meetings with both industry and business press right now because they’re so focused this story.The reporters who got spied on are getting their just revenge and the ones who weren’t spied upon are even more motivated to show they were in fact worth spying on in the first place. And we haven’t even had the Congressional hearings yet–need I mention it is an election year?